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The Hottest Chat App for Teens is Google Docs (theatlantic.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: As more and more laptops find their way into middle and high schools, educators are using Google Docs to do collaborative exercises and help students follow along with the lesson plan. The students, however, are using it to organize running conversations behind teachers' backs. Teens told me they use Google Docs to chat just about any time they need to put their phone away but know their friends will be on computers. Sometimes they'll use the service's live chat function, which doesn't open by default, and which many teachers don't even know exists. Or, they'll take advantage of the fact that Google allows users to highlight certain phrases or words, then comment on them via a pop-up box on the right side: They'll clone a teacher's shared Google document, then chat in the comments, so it appears to the causal viewer that they're just making notes on the lesson plan. If a teacher approaches to take a closer look, they can click the "Resolve" button and the entire thread will disappear.
If the project isn't a collaborative one, kids will just create a shared document where they'll chat line by line in what looks like a paragraph of text. "People will just make a new page and talk in different fonts so you know who is who," Skyler said. "I had one really good friend and we were in different homerooms. So, we'd email each other a doc and would just chat about whatever was going on." At the end of class, they just delete a doc or resolve all the comments. Rarely does anyone save them the way previous generations may have stored away paper notes from friends.
If the project isn't a collaborative one, kids will just create a shared document where they'll chat line by line in what looks like a paragraph of text. "People will just make a new page and talk in different fonts so you know who is who," Skyler said. "I had one really good friend and we were in different homerooms. So, we'd email each other a doc and would just chat about whatever was going on." At the end of class, they just delete a doc or resolve all the comments. Rarely does anyone save them the way previous generations may have stored away paper notes from friends.
There's no lack of equity in the tools that any of the teachers, students, or indeed, any of us have.
Teachers don't have a mainframe and students dumb terminals.
No, instead we have CaptainDork's Corollary: "For every motherfucker out there with a computer, there's another motherfucker out there with a computer."
In an essentially P2P architecture, it's a level playing field.
The students are just a lot more imaginative, creative, and innovative, and connected than the teachers.
Because the student population is larger than the teacher headcount, simple math predicts that the students are more capable.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Chromebooks are popular in schools now. And by popular, I mean with the school districts.
Chromebooks are cheap. The district can negotiate with multiple hardware manufacturers for volume discounts. A Chromebook is easily replaced if lost, stolen or eaten. All of the student's "cloud based" course work and assignments are instantly on the new Chromebook as soon as the student logs in. The Chromebooks are easily reset -- even remotely, for the next incoming school year. With Cloud Print, students -- or faculty -- can print to various printers in the school to which they are given access. Access to everything on a Chromebook is centrally controlled once the district joins new Chromebook hardware to their Google account.
Now given the above, THAT is the biggest reason why I see Google Docs as a chat application. If everyone had Windows or Macs they could use other potential chat applications.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
So they reinvented Google Wave
Rarely does anyone save them the way previous generations may have stored away paper notes from friends.
Kids aren't stupid. They see people almost being denied a supreme court seat because they once had a beer while in school.
Under such circumstances, would the natural inclination not be to go totally dark? To leave no permanent record of your existence to critique, so that at any time you could conform to the current popular GroupThink?? No wonder SnapChat is also so popular.
The only mistake they are making I would say, is in trusting Google to actually delete something... but Google has the tools they need - for the moment.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So some kids found a creative workaround for communicating during class? And that qualifies as the "hottest chat app for teens," does it?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Have someone flip the power switch on the router and tell them to bring up MS Word, WordPad or even Notepad and spend 30 minutes writing a grammatically correct 4 paragraph introduction to a prospective employer arguing why you are a fit for the position**
** "Yes, you an make up all your quals, but it needs to read like a young man or woman is approaching a job as a respectable potential employee."
Sit back and watch the mayhem that ensues outside of those districts that still have parents and teachers that don't think like this:
You shut people off from the world, they'll find ways to get messages in and out.
Let them chat.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
You shut people off from the world, they'll find ways to get messages in and out.
Let them chat.
Alternatively make the lessons interesting, so nobody can be bothered to chat.
When attendance is mandatory, it guarantees a portion of those will have no interest in learning.